


the least you can do, when none of this is easy at all

by stephanericher



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: KNBxNBA, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-11
Updated: 2018-05-11
Packaged: 2019-05-05 11:31:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14617508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stephanericher/pseuds/stephanericher
Summary: “I want that, even though I don’t want to want that, you know?”





	the least you can do, when none of this is easy at all

**Author's Note:**

> may contain mild sacrilege(?)

Wei is thirty-three the summer his youngest brother gets married. Still too young for this, Wei’s decided, even though he’s got teammates five years younger than his brother who are more like men than kids, but that’s irrelevant (they’re irrelevant). He didn’t wipe their runny noses or pull them away from outlets or help them learn long division; they didn’t cling to him at the airport before he went off to Akita as a teenager and they don’t pretend to forget they did when Wei catches their eye over dinner and reminds everyone he’s going back after the wedding.

(No, Wei’s second-youngest brother is wrong; it has absolutely nothing to do with how old this makes Wei feel. He’s in the prime of his life.)

Tatsuya has better humor about it; maybe it’s because he’s charmed the shit out of Wei’s brother’s future mother-in-law despite his still-very-broken Chinese and his woeful etiquette and having way more patience with all of Wei’s brothers than they deserve.

“Sometimes I think you like them better than you like me,” Wei says.

Tatsuya raises an eyebrow. “Really.”

“I mean,” says Wei.

(They’re not getting old. Wei’s still immature enough to hold out the bait and Tatsuya’s still immature enough to take it.)

* * *

The wedding is nice, all in all. Even if it’s Wei’s baby brother, at least he chose a nice young woman with a nice family; the food is good and there’s an open bar, and five drinks in Tatsuya’s a little buzzed and leaning against Wei, one hand fisted so tight in Wei’s jacket it’s going to leave permanent wrinkles.

Tatsuya blinks up at him, a little slow, then knocks his forehead against Wei’s chest. Maybe he’s a little more than buzzed; maybe the liquor’s finally catching up with him. He’s still cute as fuck, openly affectionate like this, holding Wei tighter like he’s the real thing in a room full of facsimiles. A strong gesture, compressed, like their time together has been since before they knew how to value it like the stupid kids they were.

even now, Wei wants to pick Tatsuya up and carry him off somewhere they can be alone. It bothers him more than he’ll say that even when they are together they have to share each other—a contradiction; he wants to share Tatsuya and show him off with the people who matter to him most, but he wants to snatch Tatsuya away and keep him all to himself. Wei’s brother and his wife are laughing, her head tipped back against his neck, both of them smiling as if in acknowledgement of their luck and happiness. Wei can’t really feel jealous of the house they already share and return to every night, the way the passage of time together isn’t divided into rough peaks and valleys like a half-flattened EKG, but something smooth and linear. He wants that, but it’s not worth clearing out everything in the way  right now to get it.

Maybe it is, but Wei’s convinced himself to it’s not.

* * *

“I didn’t think you’d really do this,” Tatsuya says, the stem of his wineglass dangling between his fingers. “I didn’t think you wouldn’t, either, but…”

“You said you’d like to come back,” says Wei. “And I knew you weren’t going to do anything about it on your own.”

Tatsuya grins, reaching his free hand across his body to touch Wei’s thigh. Wei covers it with his own; the feeling of Tatsuya’s hand, smaller and somehow still soft despite half the hours of his entire waking life having been devoted to playing basketball—one of the first things Wei had come to like about Tatsuya. That’s not the right way to say it; he’d liked Tatsuya’s smile and his shoulders and his eye and the way he carried himself, the well-practiced way he talked, a little bit stilted and a little bit foreign. But those were things everyone saw and noticed and liked about Tatsuya; holding hands like that was all Wei’s. It’s more that this was one of the first things that hand made Wei consider Tatsuya to be, in some fashion, his.

A few miles away in this same town, so many years ago, right around this time of year, when the late snows had long since melted to puddles and ceded to rain and humidity, and Tatsuya had perched on the edge of Wei’s bed, pulling his strings like a master of marionettes working the simplest production imaginable to draw Wei into his arms.

He hadn’t had to go that far; Wei was his already, but at the time it had been a little bit of salve on Wei’s pride.

“Remember when we hooked up the first time? In my dorm room?”

“When your roommate was away for the weekend,” says Tatsuya. “But you still kept starting when you heard movement outside.”

Wei feels his face caught somewhere between a cringe and a straight-up frown. Tatsuya nudges his shoulder, but says no more.

Of course Wei remembers it, sharp pieces of the memory stuck in his mind like high-definition video reduced to two frames per second. Tatsuya leaning over, his hand reaching up Wei’s shirt, the undone belt buckle on his school pants, the feeling of his fingers separated from Wei’s neck by only a thin shirt-collar, his lips swollen as he’d pulled away from Wei, and Wei had thought he’d never want to stop kissing Tatsuya.

The man whose feet are flat on the hotel carpet , whose thumb is brushing Wei’s wrist, is much the same but much different. And Wei is still very much inclined to kiss him foreer, until his lips are dry and chapped and taste nothing like the wine in his glass. That feeling isn’t the same, not something he’s dragged out of his memory with a forklift or carefully replicated. It comes from somewhere else in him, split off from the path.

And neither of them is nearly so self-conscious as they’d been sixteen years ago. There is no moment to wait for, or to chase; Tatsuya looks as if he’s going to take another sip of wine but Wei gets to his mouth first.

* * *

Tatsuya pretends not to have forgotten his way around, but when they’re half an hour into searching for the diner where they were supposed to have been eating breakfast, We takes out his phone and turns on the GPS. They’re actually not far; Wei remembers the names of the cross streets if not the name of the diner.

He supposes he shouldn’t be terribly surprised it’s not there. Neither is the barber shop several buildings away or the bookstore across the street; Wei’s fairly certain the Burger King at the end of the block had been there but if it had, it’s been renovated. The diner itself, though, is an empty lot, or maybe it’s the shoe store next door. A tabby cat peers through the weeds in the lot, and, deciding that Tatsuya and Wei can do nothing for it, turns tail and wanders off. Wei’s stomach growls. He points at the Burger King.

Tatsuya lets Wei order for himself, which Wei appreciates; he can remember how to ask for coffee and two Whoppers, at least, even if his spoken Japanese is kind of shit. They don’t talk much as they eat; there’s nothing to reminisce about in this particular restaurant, and the surface of the bench is uncomfortable so Wei’s extra interested in eating quickly and leaving.

* * *

It was Tatsuya who’d said he’d wanted to come, in an offhand and indirect manner, but he’d suggested it all the same. He’d asked Wei if he’d ever thought about going back there, a little too casually, and then changed the subject to a restaurant he’d just been to that Wei would have to try the next time he visited. It had been late; their phone call had ended soon after, but on the back of an old receipt, Wei had scribbled “Akita”.

He hadn’t done anything until he’d gotten the official invitation to his brother’s wedding, but he’d figured, then, that the opportunity was presenting itself, and so instead of booking him and Tatsuya a round trip from New York, he booked them one way, and the other way to Akita, and then back.

Proximity to the wedding had made him consider, as he did every now and then, asking Tatsuya to marry him. The thought passed through every few years, stuck around like it wouldn’t let go, and then rotted off, as if satisfied with Wei’s resistance. It would be nice, in theory, as so many things were, to marry Tatsuya. Maybe not now, but sometime in the future, champagne and dancing and rings on their fingers, a contract sealing them together, something official and legitimate in ways that—not in ways that they aren’t, but something sealed atop whatever physical distance lay between them.

It’s not simple or even, though it may be treated as such, the ultimate expression of love or affection or happiness. It’s not something Wei is sure he wants, even when there’s a voice in his head telling him to go for it and get down on one knee. A set of vows and pieces of paper wouldn’t keep them closer than what keeps them together now; Tatsuya would probably find that much insulting and Wei really can’t blame him.

It’s not something he needs, but it still symbolizes a concrete promise about the future, a more solid one than either Wei or Tatsuya has ever made. But coming here, at least, would be—at least Wei had thought it would—a trip into the past. Good memories, when they’d lived more like a married couple as teenagers than they do now as working adults, things that might clarify the future like melting butter.

Hopes for simplicity turn out so rarely, but Wei deludes himself anyway.

* * *

The school chapel is much as they remember it. It’s easy to get inside the school, even without being recognized; Tatsuya charms the receptionist (and, after all, they are alumni) and they’re in. The buildings are the same, new windows and a different paint job inside, but the chapel is frozen, matching Wei’s memory like a tracing slid into just the right place over the original. It smells like the same dust floating in the dim light of the stained glass; the pews creak as they sit, and the same scratched bibles lie in the pockets on the back of the bench in front of them. Wei’s knees are jammed even more uncomfortably in here; he spreads his legs in a way that would be obnoxious if there were anyone around him.

“In a house of God?” says Tatsuya, the tone of disapproval eerily similar to their religion teacher—what was her name?

Wei drags a hand down his face. It’s been so long since he’d thought about most of this, the dusty chapel and the windowpanes, religion and algebra and English, the giggling female classmates who’d made Tatsuya’s locker and desk overflow with chocolates on Valentine’s Day (and had made Wei very irritable, especially when Tatsuya had told him he was cute when he was jealous). He's thought about Tatsuya, and basketball, and stolen moments in the locker room or one of their dorm rooms, in a supply closet, walking home after practice in winter when their faces grew pasty from never seeing the sun—

“What was our religion teacher’s name?”

Tatsuya frowns. “Shiraki, I think.”

It doesn’t sound quite right, but it’s better than anything he’s got.

Tatsuya had let him sit on the end of the row even though, as they’d filed in, he’d gotten that seat. That was the first day he was here, before Wei had known him as more than another new transfer student. He’d scooted over and Wei had stretched his legs into the aisle and murmured a thanks. Tatsuya had shrugged, and Wei had been caught by the way his body had moved, and any efforts Tatsuya had made to further seduce him had been redundant. But quite appreciated, regardless.

* * *

Wei’s tongue has been tied for too long. He’s spent, if not all of the last fourteen years or so, then a great deal of it, pushing difficult conversations to the back of his mind when he’s with Tatsuya. The handfuls of time they have together always fall through his cupped hands like cold water; they put aside conflict when they’re together and argue when they’re close to leaving because it makes it easier, the least they can do because none of this is easy at all.

The hardest conversation they’ve had was here, Tatsuya scrolling and re-scrolling through an email on his laptop, received from the American university he’d been so keen on attending. Wei hadn’t deluded himself into thinking that he was NBA-caliber, or that Tatsuya would ever be satisfied with another league in the long run, but he'd still let himself hope and chase the fantasies of him and Tatsuya, playing for the local team in Akita (the one Coach said she'd known all the members of, taught them or beat them up when they were in rival gangs), or even on the same CBA team, streaking up and down the court in the same colors, still, for a year or two longer. It had been difficult for Wei to look into Tatsuya’s eye then and tell him, honestly, what he’d wanted, and it had been difficult for Tatsuya to look back and not play with his necklace (the thing that in his worst young moments, Wei had been jealous of, how it had tied him to people and places entirely outside of Wei) and say that this was what he was going to do.

But they’d still done it, and they’d still stayed together, and there’s no point in staying a little bit longer now if they’re nearing a split in the ten-lane highway where Tatsuya’s been on the far left and Wei the far right—always within reach, always close to exits and turnarounds.

Tatsuya still gets excited about Japanese festivals; it’s just as cute now as when he was sixteen and trying to figure out how to catch a fish in his hands, not complaining about the blisters from the geta on his feet. They’re still the same, different graphics and teenagers doing different things with better phones, but the games are the same and the food is the same, sticky and greasy and shareable.

Tatsuya makes Wei redo the shooting game five times until finally half-admitting defeat; Wei wants to kiss the competitive heat right off his face. He does in the shadow of some other booth when Tatsuya’s hands are full trying to keep his meat on its skewer.

There's no good time or place for it, really, but this is as good as any. Wei waits for Tatsuya to finish his food and break the wooden skewer in half, and then takes his hand.

“I don’t know,” Wei says. “Like, how much longer you’re going to keep playing, how much longer I will—I know you might, like, forever or something, but.”

He bites his lip; Tatsuya waits for him to continue.

“We can’t retire here; like, I thought about it for a second but there’s no way…and like, I’d have to go there or you’d come with me, and It’s going to be hard even if we both retire at the same time, but—you know?”

He has said far, far less than he’d meant to in too many words already.

“I’ll play as long as they’ll let me,” says Tatsuya. “But I wouldn’t mind you coming to be my kept man.”

“I’d be a shitty homemaker,” Wei says, but it’s in absolutely no effort to dissuade him and Tatsuya knows.

“You’re a decent cook. More organized than me…or we could hire a maid and you can welcome me home with an erotic massage every day.”

Wei snorts at that; Tatsuya smiles in return, a small flash.

“But I can’t take that for granted,” says Tatsuya. “That I’ll play longer than you. I don’t know. I don’t know if, even if one of us is retired, it’ll be easy to just—go with the other, even if it seems more convenient in the moment. Like, saying it here—”

Wei keeps his breathing steady.

“Of course I would, Wei. Of course I’d come back with you.”

“You’d actually learn Chinese and shit?”

“Yeah,” says Tatsuya.

It’s punctuated, but Wei’s been trying to read Tatsuya for a long enough time that he knows it’s honest, too.

“But then, after that…I don’t know,” says Tatsuya. “When we’re both old and retired and have to get used to being around each other all the time again. I want that.”

He doesn’t look done; Wei waits.

“I want that, even though I don’t want to want that, you know?”

“Yeah,” says Wei, stroking the side of his thumb. “Because, if you want it too much, it seems like being ungrateful for what you do have, and like you lose sight, and like, if you want it too much and it doesn’t happen—but it’s going to.”

Tatsuya wraps his free arm around Wei’s waist, pressing his face to Wei’s chest. His body is tense, with the weight of all both of them have said and all they still haven’t.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading
> 
> drop me a line if anything seems off


End file.
